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> In 2020, the pandemic destroyed bucket #3 for most people. We were no different. Friends from back home in Canada couldn’t visit us. Even meeting up with loca

> In 2020, the pandemic destroyed bucket #3 for most people. We were no different. Friends from back home in Canada couldn’t visit us. Even meeting up with local friends became hard. In January 2021 I tore my achilles tendon playing pick-up basketball. There goes bucket #2. > Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while. I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance: > I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life). Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.

gamerDude 4y ago
I think it's because it's because his buckets are not around time management, but energy management. And it works both ways. If you are drained by your job, you get home exhausted and want to just lay on the couch. If you are energized by your job, you get home excited. You feel like you can take on the world and then might be up to go to dinner with friends instead of drained and depressed and want to stay home and eat ice cream to console yourself (my personal go to). The same goes in the other directions. If you are healthy, you will have more energy for other things. If you are unhealthy, your body will drag you down, it will be harder to do other things. Think of having a broken leg or a lot of pain. You just don't feel well and will bring that feeling into other parts of life. Energy management isn't a zero sum game. However, I think you do point out something else. Throwing yourself into work because you want to avoid dealing with issues in your other buckets is not an energy gain. But there is a key difference between working more to avoid painful things and reigniting a spark of joy in your work.
masterof0 4y ago
I never though I would agree with PragmaticPulp ;) , I also have seen this pattern before, as someone who works at Google (SDE) and worked at Amazon previously, and also worked at unknown small/medium size companies, most team WLB at Google is pretty pretty good, you set your own rhythm of work and goals.At Amazon in the other hand is quite different, you will get PIPed for sure if your team is sweaty and you go on a normal pace, but at Google you have to be really awful to get fired. Startups use the "mission" and "family" non-sense to hustle people to work hard, while most of the times are the founders(and the VCs) the only ones that benefit.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
The idea is that is one has a fulfilling social life and physical health its easy to deal with, or even be unaware of, less fulfilling work.
bronxbomber92 4y ago
The author states it wasn't actually work-life balance that was making him happy and tired. Rather, he discovered: > By mid-2021 I was tired all the time. I know I wasn’t alone, because it was an ongoing meme inside Google2. It’s only now that I realize what was wrong: I missed the satisfaction of building things and finishing projects.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  This is the classic justification that leads people to self-defeating workaholism: The idea that you can fill the voids in your life by just working harder. The false dichotomy is the idea that the alternative to Google is to work more hours + evenings + weekends at a startup. He's replacing one problem with another, but this new problem feels fresh and new and like turning over a new leaf. At least for now.
  - lampshades 4y ago
    I mean, I'm the same way. I look back at my life and the times I didn't create things of value seem so meaningless. I don't want to go back to creating meaningless things. Even if I'm working harder, I'm enjoying what I'm doing. The article really hit home for me, personally.
    - freedom2099 4y ago
      I enjoy my work… But it is not the thing that gives meaning to my life!
  - ImprovedSilence 4y ago
    I get what he’s saying though. There can be great joy and a positive feeling of “losing yourself” in your work when you actually get to create. I think his role and and the internal bureaucracy prevented him from using that creative energy.
    - bravetraveler 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
krat0sprakhar 4y ago
+1 I'm finding this post a bit confusing as well. TBH, Google seems to be an ideal place to have work-life balance. Things move slowly and everyone expects that projects never get delivered on time (as the author points out). People generally are not expected to work outside of working hours and definitely not on weekends. I believe a better title for the blog post could be "Why I left Google: unsatisfying work" and seems more inline with what the author experienced.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Google's culture is built to replace your out of work time with time on Google campuses and ensuring your friends are other Googlers. Work-life balance for Google is just living at Google. Add that everything you say probably means your work life is also unsatisfying... I mean, nothing makes me happier about my work than when I get something done.
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    And that culture was blown out of the water when everything shut down and you were sitting at home all day. That said, while I think "offices with every perk you can think of" is definitely a part of Google culture, the "living at the office" stereotype really only applies to younger folks. Once you have a family, living in a van in the Google parking lot and showering at the gym doesn't really work.
    - bogomipz 4y ago
      >"Once you have a family, living in a van in the Google parking lot and showering at the gym doesn't really work." Are there actually folks who live in a van in the parking lot or is that a healthy bit of humor?
      - googlr29783 4y ago
        When I interviewed in pre-pandemic Mountain View, there was a section of the parking lot with around 6 RVs parked next to each other. I couldn't believe my eyes. Maybe they did it long enough to save up money for a house.
pm90 4y ago
I think they meant that once they realized their work was unsatisfying they wanted to change it. The “working late and on weekends” was a way of showing their new excitement for the role. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But I do agree the conclusion for leaving being work life balance seems incorrect.
d3nj4l 4y ago
Exactly my thoughts. It is, in fact, darkly funny that this post is titled around "work-life balance", because the author is basically saying "My life stuff wasn't working out so I tilted the scales towards work." I completely understand finding it unsatisfying to work in a situation where you're not making any progress. It's something that I think is the worst thing about my current role, and the lack of progress contributes to burnout in its own way. But working weekends and nights regularly is another, faster way to burnout, especially for someone who has a family.
- hnfong 4y ago
  Pedantically, a lack of "work-life balance" can be due to "lack of work" (as opposed to the much more common "lack of life"). Agree that the title could be better worded though.
systemvoltage 4y ago
This is overly cynical post by otherwise great comments from you, PragmaticPulp. I personally find working harder is the only way I can survive. Being unproductive is depressing because it brings lackluster mediocre life/rewards with it. With life that is less rewarding and dull, my mental health suffers. Spiraling downwards. It has happened twice. On the other hand, I never get burned out no matter hours or effort. Building stuff is too much fun. Building stuff with super cool people is even more fun. Early Googler's were the happiest bunch when it was in a startup stage. So, I can relate with the author more than your cynical take on this.
ehnto 4y ago
They did explain why they had lost job satisfaction, big companies all over the place are struggling to hold on to people as they restructure and fail to deliver due to the pandemic's impact. The morale and human cost of this organizational faltering is driving people out. Because buckets #2 and #3 are low, people are having a harder time accepting a bad hand in bucket #1. If you have a good life outside of work you can push through bad work environments for a while.
Gatsky 4y ago
Think you missed the point. Burn out can come from working in a sclerotic organisation where you fail to achieve your goals (despite doing fine professionally and financially and going home at 4pm). This became obvious to the author when other aspects of life were diminished. It also seems procrustean to assume everyone should conform to your notion of work life balance. Working hard on a problem of perceived importance may be exactly what someone wants from life. I mean sure, the author is in a somewhat luxurious position. But then, why does anyone leave Google if not for some version of this.
- drawkbox 4y ago
  Ultimately people like to have some ownership in direction of projects and products. Many times that is taken from you on larger teams. It is odd that HBS and value extractors (business/finance/project/marketing) have taken so much power from value creators (creatives/developers/product people) in terms of the power balance, most people know that makes bad products and was really the basis of capitalism starting, ownership of direction. > In his landmark 1776 work The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith showed that a clever division of labor could make a commercial enterprise vastly more productive than if each worker took personal charge of constructing a finished product. [1] The project managers and finance want to make the product now, from a value extraction viewpoint over a value creation one. It ultimately leads many value creators to go do their own thing. No matter how hard they try to remove the creative element of product creation, it is actually a key input to successful projects. Products are like creative works, they should be built with depth, deep dives and aim to be a fun experience and friend of the user. Bottom up processes can create great products with polish and love, they are value creation processes. Top down processes and deadlines create shallow features and products, they are value extraction processes. The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors. [1] https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency
  - grog454 4y ago
    What is bottom up vs top down process? It isn't mentioned in your link. > The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors. This is consistent with the development process I've used with my game/app (nebulous) for the last 7 years. I learned very early on that players responded directly (as in told me via reviews and emails) and overwhelmingly positively to frequent substantiative updates. Early on it pushed me to find my absolute limit: ~2 weeks of < 4 hours of sleep each night, on a ~28 hour day schedule. I kept bureaucracy, overhead, and expenses to a minimum and have been fortunate enough to reap the rewards over an extended period of time. My focus has always been on maximizing user experience first, revenue second.
gumby 4y ago
> Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years. This has been the key pitch since Intel at least, perhaps even Fairchild.
spoonjim 4y ago
Some people genuinely believe in their work. Jonas Salk worked hard because he believed his work mattered. This guy works hard at Replit because he believes his work matters. My family friend with Down Syndrome works hard at his menial job because he believes his work matters. If people didn’t work hard to accomplish hard things we would still be living in mud huts with 50% infant mortality.
hericium 4y ago
> this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Agree. Some rationalizations in this post reminded me of a recent "Mourning loss as a remote team"[1] entry. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811187
ano88888 4y ago
"The work life balance " is extremely confusing or misleading. He absolutely will get more work life balance at Google than at a startup. What he meant is that he got more excited because he could make more impact despite sacrificing work life balance. It is the opposite of what he claims. People should seriously stop redefining words to make themselves sound smart. And chances are he is gonna get pretty much nothing from the startup equity than from Google. (it is a bet with odds against him , statistically speaking)
terryf 4y ago
Because being miserable for 8 hours a day at work will leave you drained and depressed for the other 16. That makes socializing hard. Being exited and happy for 9 hours a day at work abd coming home with a sense of accomplishment can actually give you energy to do more for the othe 15 hours. Based on personal experience.
- TimPC 4y ago
  Yes, but you have to be very careful about the slippery slope here and how you measure things. I personally find that I sleep about the same regardless of how miserable I am at work, which means I get no quality change from roughly eight hours a day. My commute doesn't change in quality either and four many people that commute is 1 hour each way. Some people will find some other numbers that are important to subtract here. In the extreme, you'll find that an extra hour a day of work but reducing the misery of your work can result in 1 good hour of free time instead of 2 mediocre hours of free time. For most people things aren't quite that extreme but it's certainly not anything resembling 15 vs 16.
- sdevonoes 4y ago
  Think the same. In my case, though it is "Being excited and happy for 4-5 hours a day at work". More than that and my brain is just too tired to enjoy the rest of the day. My schedule is 40h/week, though, but I'm still productive doing half of that.

gamerDude 4y ago

I think it's because it's because his buckets are not around time management, but energy management. And it works both ways. If you are drained by your job, you get home exhausted and want to just lay on the couch. If you are energized by your job, you get home excited. You feel like you can take on the world and then might be up to go to dinner with friends instead of drained and depressed and want to stay home and eat ice cream to console yourself (my personal go to). The same goes in the other directions. If you are healthy, you will have more energy for other things. If you are unhealthy, your body will drag you down, it will be harder to do other things. Think of having a broken leg or a lot of pain. You just don't feel well and will bring that feeling into other parts of life. Energy management isn't a zero sum game. However, I think you do point out something else. Throwing yourself into work because you want to avoid dealing with issues in your other buckets is not an energy gain. But there is a key difference between working more to avoid painful things and reigniting a spark of joy in your work.

masterof0 4y ago

I never though I would agree with PragmaticPulp ;) , I also have seen this pattern before, as someone who works at Google (SDE) and worked at Amazon previously, and also worked at unknown small/medium size companies, most team WLB at Google is pretty pretty good, you set your own rhythm of work and goals.At Amazon in the other hand is quite different, you will get PIPed for sure if your team is sweaty and you go on a normal pace, but at Google you have to be really awful to get fired. Startups use the "mission" and "family" non-sense to hustle people to work hard, while most of the times are the founders(and the VCs) the only ones that benefit.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

The idea is that is one has a fulfilling social life and physical health its easy to deal with, or even be unaware of, less fulfilling work.

bronxbomber92 4y ago

The author states it wasn't actually work-life balance that was making him happy and tired. Rather, he discovered: > By mid-2021 I was tired all the time. I know I wasn’t alone, because it was an ongoing meme inside Google2. It’s only now that I realize what was wrong: I missed the satisfaction of building things and finishing projects.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
This is the classic justification that leads people to self-defeating workaholism: The idea that you can fill the voids in your life by just working harder. The false dichotomy is the idea that the alternative to Google is to work more hours + evenings + weekends at a startup. He's replacing one problem with another, but this new problem feels fresh and new and like turning over a new leaf. At least for now.
- lampshades 4y ago
  I mean, I'm the same way. I look back at my life and the times I didn't create things of value seem so meaningless. I don't want to go back to creating meaningless things. Even if I'm working harder, I'm enjoying what I'm doing. The article really hit home for me, personally.
  - freedom2099 4y ago
    I enjoy my work… But it is not the thing that gives meaning to my life!
- ImprovedSilence 4y ago
  I get what he’s saying though. There can be great joy and a positive feeling of “losing yourself” in your work when you actually get to create. I think his role and and the internal bureaucracy prevented him from using that creative energy.
  - bravetraveler 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

krat0sprakhar 4y ago

+1 I'm finding this post a bit confusing as well. TBH, Google seems to be an ideal place to have work-life balance. Things move slowly and everyone expects that projects never get delivered on time (as the author points out). People generally are not expected to work outside of working hours and definitely not on weekends. I believe a better title for the blog post could be "Why I left Google: unsatisfying work" and seems more inline with what the author experienced.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Google's culture is built to replace your out of work time with time on Google campuses and ensuring your friends are other Googlers. Work-life balance for Google is just living at Google. Add that everything you say probably means your work life is also unsatisfying... I mean, nothing makes me happier about my work than when I get something done.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  And that culture was blown out of the water when everything shut down and you were sitting at home all day. That said, while I think "offices with every perk you can think of" is definitely a part of Google culture, the "living at the office" stereotype really only applies to younger folks. Once you have a family, living in a van in the Google parking lot and showering at the gym doesn't really work.
  - bogomipz 4y ago
    >"Once you have a family, living in a van in the Google parking lot and showering at the gym doesn't really work." Are there actually folks who live in a van in the parking lot or is that a healthy bit of humor?
    - googlr29783 4y ago
      When I interviewed in pre-pandemic Mountain View, there was a section of the parking lot with around 6 RVs parked next to each other. I couldn't believe my eyes. Maybe they did it long enough to save up money for a house.

pm90 4y ago

I think they meant that once they realized their work was unsatisfying they wanted to change it. The “working late and on weekends” was a way of showing their new excitement for the role. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But I do agree the conclusion for leaving being work life balance seems incorrect.

d3nj4l 4y ago

Exactly my thoughts. It is, in fact, darkly funny that this post is titled around "work-life balance", because the author is basically saying "My life stuff wasn't working out so I tilted the scales towards work." I completely understand finding it unsatisfying to work in a situation where you're not making any progress. It's something that I think is the worst thing about my current role, and the lack of progress contributes to burnout in its own way. But working weekends and nights regularly is another, faster way to burnout, especially for someone who has a family.

hnfong 4y ago
Pedantically, a lack of "work-life balance" can be due to "lack of work" (as opposed to the much more common "lack of life"). Agree that the title could be better worded though.

systemvoltage 4y ago

This is overly cynical post by otherwise great comments from you, PragmaticPulp. I personally find working harder is the only way I can survive. Being unproductive is depressing because it brings lackluster mediocre life/rewards with it. With life that is less rewarding and dull, my mental health suffers. Spiraling downwards. It has happened twice. On the other hand, I never get burned out no matter hours or effort. Building stuff is too much fun. Building stuff with super cool people is even more fun. Early Googler's were the happiest bunch when it was in a startup stage. So, I can relate with the author more than your cynical take on this.

ehnto 4y ago

They did explain why they had lost job satisfaction, big companies all over the place are struggling to hold on to people as they restructure and fail to deliver due to the pandemic's impact. The morale and human cost of this organizational faltering is driving people out. Because buckets #2 and #3 are low, people are having a harder time accepting a bad hand in bucket #1. If you have a good life outside of work you can push through bad work environments for a while.

Gatsky 4y ago

Think you missed the point. Burn out can come from working in a sclerotic organisation where you fail to achieve your goals (despite doing fine professionally and financially and going home at 4pm). This became obvious to the author when other aspects of life were diminished. It also seems procrustean to assume everyone should conform to your notion of work life balance. Working hard on a problem of perceived importance may be exactly what someone wants from life. I mean sure, the author is in a somewhat luxurious position. But then, why does anyone leave Google if not for some version of this.

drawkbox 4y ago
Ultimately people like to have some ownership in direction of projects and products. Many times that is taken from you on larger teams. It is odd that HBS and value extractors (business/finance/project/marketing) have taken so much power from value creators (creatives/developers/product people) in terms of the power balance, most people know that makes bad products and was really the basis of capitalism starting, ownership of direction. > In his landmark 1776 work The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith showed that a clever division of labor could make a commercial enterprise vastly more productive than if each worker took personal charge of constructing a finished product. [1] The project managers and finance want to make the product now, from a value extraction viewpoint over a value creation one. It ultimately leads many value creators to go do their own thing. No matter how hard they try to remove the creative element of product creation, it is actually a key input to successful projects. Products are like creative works, they should be built with depth, deep dives and aim to be a fun experience and friend of the user. Bottom up processes can create great products with polish and love, they are value creation processes. Top down processes and deadlines create shallow features and products, they are value extraction processes. The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors. [1] https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency
- grog454 4y ago
  What is bottom up vs top down process? It isn't mentioned in your link. > The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors. This is consistent with the development process I've used with my game/app (nebulous) for the last 7 years. I learned very early on that players responded directly (as in told me via reviews and emails) and overwhelmingly positively to frequent substantiative updates. Early on it pushed me to find my absolute limit: ~2 weeks of < 4 hours of sleep each night, on a ~28 hour day schedule. I kept bureaucracy, overhead, and expenses to a minimum and have been fortunate enough to reap the rewards over an extended period of time. My focus has always been on maximizing user experience first, revenue second.

gumby 4y ago

> Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years. This has been the key pitch since Intel at least, perhaps even Fairchild.

spoonjim 4y ago

Some people genuinely believe in their work. Jonas Salk worked hard because he believed his work mattered. This guy works hard at Replit because he believes his work matters. My family friend with Down Syndrome works hard at his menial job because he believes his work matters. If people didn’t work hard to accomplish hard things we would still be living in mud huts with 50% infant mortality.

hericium 4y ago

> this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Agree. Some rationalizations in this post reminded me of a recent "Mourning loss as a remote team"[1] entry. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811187

ano88888 4y ago

"The work life balance " is extremely confusing or misleading. He absolutely will get more work life balance at Google than at a startup. What he meant is that he got more excited because he could make more impact despite sacrificing work life balance. It is the opposite of what he claims. People should seriously stop redefining words to make themselves sound smart. And chances are he is gonna get pretty much nothing from the startup equity than from Google. (it is a bet with odds against him , statistically speaking)

terryf 4y ago

Because being miserable for 8 hours a day at work will leave you drained and depressed for the other 16. That makes socializing hard. Being exited and happy for 9 hours a day at work abd coming home with a sense of accomplishment can actually give you energy to do more for the othe 15 hours. Based on personal experience.

TimPC 4y ago
Yes, but you have to be very careful about the slippery slope here and how you measure things. I personally find that I sleep about the same regardless of how miserable I am at work, which means I get no quality change from roughly eight hours a day. My commute doesn't change in quality either and four many people that commute is 1 hour each way. Some people will find some other numbers that are important to subtract here. In the extreme, you'll find that an extra hour a day of work but reducing the misery of your work can result in 1 good hour of free time instead of 2 mediocre hours of free time. For most people things aren't quite that extreme but it's certainly not anything resembling 15 vs 16.
sdevonoes 4y ago
Think the same. In my case, though it is "Being excited and happy for 4-5 hours a day at work". More than that and my brain is just too tired to enjoy the rest of the day. My schedule is 40h/week, though, but I'm still productive doing half of that.